The Other Guy
Luke 23:33-43

November 25, 2007


Time is on our side, yes it is - except that in an odd way we are at the end of our time for this year. Only when you come into a church will you know that this is the last Sunday of our Christian year, for no signs in our stores and billboards proclaim this Christ the King or the Reign of Christ Sunday. It is almost a secret.

Literally, half the year has been journeyed in Pentecost - this is the 26th Sunday after Pentecost - the time of the Holy Spirit, tongues ablazing. It has to stop somewhere if we are going to reach Christmas in time and the rule is Pentecost stops with four Sundays to go before Christmas. The mysterious people who have managed such things as the liturgical seasons of the Christian year did not want us fading away into the 26th Sunday sunset, but gave it a not too creative, but definite name - the Last Sunday after Pentecost. That needed some excitement, so in recent generations the Last Sunday has been dubbed, first, Christ the King, and even more recently, the Reign of Christ.

Why the Reign of Christ, a royal occasion, comes directly out of this reading at Golgotha. It is a sudden jar to the system as we have been hearing about the teaching and healing of Jesus for months. Now this reading catapults you and me to the foot of the cross to overhear the conversation of Jesus and the two criminals and we wonder why, particularly with all the Advent readings on our doorstep.

Kingdom talk is what does it. In Canada there is still is a queen and a king somewhere in waiting, but for much of the rest of the world a King is an ancient, if not painful position. Not too many Christians today believe in the idea of a king. And neither did the Old and New Testament world, although there were more kings of Israel to forget than to remember. There was always a persistent, nagging stream of thought which believed that royalty was for other peoples, that a king in Israel was copying the pagans, an affront to the Only True God who is the only real King of the Universe.

Jesus was not alone. In traditional Gospel imagery, he was part of a trinity, a threesome of criminals being executed beginning that day. The crowd that accompanied Jesus on the Via Dolorosa was there for Jesus, but there were perhaps two other processions going on, perhaps there was none. Jesus typically was raised up in the middle of things.

“Father, forgive them; for they don’t know what they are doing.” Oh, actually a lot of people knew exactly what they were doing and were very skilled at crucifixions and public executions, having done it many times before. It is not uncommon to talk about how TV and the internet desensitize all of us towards death and mass murder through its continual visualization. In ancient society, in the good old days without TV, violence and death was part and parcel of a brutal and violent world. Most of the people at Golgotha, the Skull, were professionals in the death business.

They cast lots to divide his clothes; one might as well get something useful out of death duty. The other major use of lots in the Bible is the sailors casting lots during the terrible storm at sea to see who was at fault, and the lot of death fell on Jonah. Early Christians did not miss the fact that Jonah too spent three days in the belly of the earth before coming back to full life.

Then the camera shifts to the crowd. The people, the plain old people were just standing by watching - a time honoured ritual. The rulers, who had an intense and professional interest in seeing Jesus die, scoffed at him, probably a stronger word than scoff is needed, but this is the Bible. “He saved others - supposedly; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One.” Funny how your enemies will identify you in a way you would never have the ego to do for yourself. Jesus never used those titles; the rulers, the religious professionals, were afraid that was what Jesus really was, so they said it out loud in the hopes he would go away.

The soldiers took their turn in their blood sport and picking up on what they were hearing, mocked him as King of the Jews. Someone was allowed to place an inscription over his head on the wood, “This is the King of the Jews,” in trilingual languages some versions report. This is Christ the King Sunday - it’s exactly what his enemies were calling him.

For the third time, another trinity of words, someone rails at him about his claim to be the Christ and not saving himself. “Save me/us too” was added just in case.

There was the other guy, however, and he simply thought differently. “Do you not fear God?” he rebuked the first one. In the 20 centuries between then and now, that would have been a throwaway question because of course everyone would have said they believed in God, just part of the culture. But today as then most people will laugh and scoff at the idea of believing in any god. The Biblical world and the 21st century are really not that different at all which is something to be afraid of! The criminal knows the man in the centre has done nothing wrong except be the Right Man.

He spoke, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingly power.” This criminal is the only guy to call Jesus by name, not Rabbi or Teacher or Lord, and having heard all this king talk bandied about he recognizes a king in waiting when he sees one. Now keep in mind that this is while the two of them are dying slow deaths on crosses, so king and kingdom talk may at first appear a side-effect of delusion. Our King is always a crucified King.

When my wife was a young child she had a relative who lost a leg to diabetes. The leg was removed in a Roman Catholic hospital in a nearby town.

Following the operation the nurse came to her and asked – “what would you like to have us do with the leg?” Bessie – ever a practical woman replied – “just throw it in the furnace.”

“Oh no,” said the nurse, “we can’t do that, you’ll need it in heaven when you are whole again. It has to be buried.”

And that’s how Bessie’s leg went before her into eternity.

At that point in its history of dogma the Catholic Church certainly expected Bessie to be re-membered when she went through the pearly gates or was cast into the fiery pit for that matter.

Re-membered – made whole. Jesus, Re-member me – make me whole.

Christ the King Sunday as the final note in the symphony of the Christian year was only inaugurated in 1925, so it is not an ancient holy day. In recent years the title has been amended to the “Reign of Christ,” on one hand for purposes of inclusive language - King is after all a masculine title only. On the other hand, the idea of reign, a time of ruling, fits better because Jesus did not like to be called King.

Jesus says to the God-fearing criminal, “Truly, today you will be with me in Paradise.” It is the only place in the Gospels where Jesus uses the word paradise and it is a different place than the Kingdom. Paradise is ironically for our world’s political situation a Persian or Iranian loanword into other Near Eastern languages for a pleasant garden. It is the place where the faithful wait to enter the heavenly realms.

On this Last Sunday of the year, desperate as we are to squeeze in all the righteousness we can, paradise and the kingdom of heaven and all the other terms are not some future events in the bye and bye, but right now. Paradise is here now, not in a better location where there is better weather, not when the world gets straightened out and all the wars are ended and all the genocides have ceased and the racial prejudices have disappeared and the sectarian and religious wars and terrorism have melted away, and the NDP and the Saskatchewan Party love each other and think each other is a most worthy and competent government. No, Paradise happens now at the foot of the cross when Jesus re-members you and pulls your fragmentary nature back into one whole body and soul. You and I are in Paradise, not when everything is perfect and lovely, but when we are re-membered by the Suffering Servant who makes whole the Body of Christ, this gathered company of sinners and saints we call our church. Today you are in Paradise. As we are re-membered, let us re-member those suffering besides us.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan